Philemon
Careful exegesis of verse 7 closes out the series, alongside the small chiasm found in verses 5-7 that rewards close, patient reading rather than a quick pass. Paul’s own placement of love before faith in verse 5 gets specific attention, an ordering easy to read past. The Bible’s complexities, the sermon insists in closing, are not an obstacle to faith but part of what draws a reader more deeply into it.
Prayer’s real, grand goal should be the End itself rather than merely present relief, a claim tested against Luke 11:3’s request for ‘this day tomorrow’s bread,’ read here as reaching toward that same end. Jesus, Paul, and James agree remarkably closely about what prayer is actually for, despite writing in different genres and settings. Praying for today, properly understood, already means praying for the last day.
Paul’s prayers open onto a genuinely heavenly life, one Romans 8:26 locates within a larger groaning creation whose real goal is the resurrection of the redeemed on the last day. Believers, like creation itself and like Christ, are called to give themselves away rather than hold onto themselves. Prayer, read this way, participates in that same self-giving pattern rather than functioning as a private transaction.
Paul’s whole attitude toward prayer, surveyed across the letter so far, gets summarized here before the sermon turns to something structural: chiasm and parallelism as literary devices, and the discovery that the entire epistle to Philemon is itself built as one large chiasm. Seeing that structure changes how the letter’s small parts relate to its whole. Form, in this letter, is doing real argumentative work.
Christ’s death and resurrection genuinely changed how Paul prays, a claim this sermon backs up by noting there are no real Old Testament examples of saints giving thanks for others the way Paul routinely does. Ephesians 1:18 gets careful exegetical attention as another instance of that same pattern. Giving thanks for other believers, on this reading, is a distinctly New Testament habit of prayer.
Paul’s own prayer is treated here as itself a gift of grace rather than an achievement, which is exactly where Arminian and Reformed accounts of sanctification and prayer part ways. Sanctification, carefully defined, is a matter of becoming what believers already are in Christ rather than becoming something new. Boasting, in the end, belongs only to the Lord, never to the one being sanctified.
A review of the new day in prayer and the meaning of ‘always’ sets up a fresh angle: the Old Testament’s priestly incense offerings, read here as prefiguring Christ’s own perpetual prayers. Thanksgiving for others is not an optional addition to prayer but part of what makes it real. The eternal realm, this sermon insists, is not a future abstraction but something prayer already participates in now.
Paul’s claim to pray ‘always’ gets careful definition, ruling out both a literalistic misreading and a watered-down one that empties the word of its force. What actually grounds that constancy is Paul’s own bond with Christ, who himself prays always on his people’s behalf. Human prayer, on this account, is possible only because it’s caught up in Christ’s own unceasing prayer.
Christ’s coming inaugurates a genuinely new day of prayer, marked by an intimacy and assurance 2 Chronicles 20’s Old Testament prayer did not yet have access to. Paul’s own prayers, overflowing with joy and thanksgiving for others, model what that new day actually sounds like. Even measured against the Psalms, Paul’s prayer life shows real change, not mere continuation.
Paul’s salutation is deliberately heavenly, set against the pattern of an earthly king’s greeting, and Numbers 6’s priestly blessing supplies its real ancestor. Paul writes as a kind of apostolic priest, dispatched from God’s own sanctuary to bless God’s people. His own humiliation, patterned after Christ’s, is what actually qualifies him for that priestly role, no status of his own.